How the Players Evolve

We've talked a little bit about, you know, who are some of the major players in the space. We talked a little bit about Apple Pay and Google Pay. We've talked about how PayPal recently has verticalized, which was really interesting with the acquisition of Braintree. You know, what about other e-com providers? Like, how are they likely to evolve in this space, particularly with Shopify? You know, Shopify is so top of mind for people. What have we kind of seen, especially as it pertains to payments in our space, Ryan? Yeah, well, you know, e-commerce is how it's always been, at least since online payments has really been

a thing. That's been the solution. Go to a website, add the art and Instacart, make a purchase. That's how it's always been. That's what Shopify is built for. That's what all these providers built for. And clearly that solution is going to need to exist in the market forever. There's just always a reason to buy that way. Right. Just like you'll always need to maybe go into a physical store for something. Exactly. It's become a natural part of our world, but maybe just not as an efficient one as it used to be, right? Yeah. For all the reasons we talked about. I mean, if you build

a one size fits all solution, you won't be amazing at anything, but you'll be good at a little bit of everything. Yeah. Right. That's true. And so they are the de facto solution. If you make an ad today, put it on Instagram and have a swipe up, it's going to take you to a website. That's the de facto solution. That's what everyone's been using. The thing is we already know that converts at one to 2%. That's locked in. It's just, you're stuck in that world. You know that only 1% of the people who see that ad are actually going to ever make a purchase. And

that's being good at a little bit. And is Whym ever going to be a part of like one of those, you know, checkout buttons in your mind? Today, they already are, right? Like today you can swipe up straight to Whym. And the difference in what your consumer sees is it's very narrowly focused to them being in that channel in that moment and how they're going to deal with you in that space. And so we narrow the customer's focus on the specific products that you're interested in. We narrow the customer's focus on the decisions they have to make. And then we give them a very simple

solution to either make a purchase or tell you, or to basically remind themselves that they want to remember you so that they can come back later and finish that deal when they're, when it's on their time. It was one of the key insights that we really saw, right? There was this opportunity to reduce that paradox of choice, which I think a lot of consumers are faced with as they, you know, they get to that website. Once again, like, where is the product merchandise? Am I going to go through this entire exercise of building a cart? What's really amazing about how we've architected the cart technology

is that, you know, you can actually, we're pre-building a cart. Yeah. Right. But it's, it's, it has the ability to be personalized, which is really special. There's nothing quite like it in the market yet. And it takes advantage of the in-app mobile browser, which I know, you know, a lot about and have studied like intimately. Yeah. And so, you know, Whym's technology is not only this payment for either impulse buy or intent to buy later, but it's also this cart technology where you can share a cart with a million of your customers at the same time. And then in real time, they can personalize, you

know, their selection. How, how do you think about, you know, the in-app mobile browser being such a key component of how we've, you know, decided to really build the technology? Well, there are a variety of things that a browser has solved for the world that messaging channels have not even begun to think about how to solve. Like security. How do you take a credit card over a text message? You do, definitely do not want to have a card entered into your text message history. Not only is it in the customer's phone history, it's in the carrier's phone logs. Oh my gosh. I have to close

my eyes for this. I can't look. I mean, it's a mess and it's really dangerous and scary. And so luckily for us, every messaging SMS application out there has the ability to deep link into a web browser. And they, the browsers they use kind of slide over the messaging app like a drawer and then go away right back to the messaging app when you're done using them. But you get to take advantage of all the security around HTTPS. You get to take advantage around all the things that have been done for PCI compliance in the browser space. You get to take advantage of all the

user experiences that you can use to, for instance, help the customer select the right product. And you don't have to create these wonky little like reply A, reply B, reply the name of the product you want. Yeah. Keyword card building. We tried a bunch of that, right? Because that was the natural inclination like, Oh, okay. Maybe consumers would be comfortable with, you know, building through keywords. And it turns out they're just not really comfortable with, you know, those types of experiences just yet. Not that they won't be in the future, right? And then the idea of entering a hashtag or, you know, there are some

familiar, um, you know, design paradigms that really kind of work with that. We have identified some interesting use cases. Well, those are very useful things that can happen in the world. And we, we, we, we know how to do them. Most of the transactions we see happening online are not those. Yeah. Right. Most transactions that we're seeing brands trying to build their customers are not the, they're not catered to a reply to buy kind of environment yet. Definitely. But there are cases that work. If you're interested in them, come talk to us and we'll help you out. That's the enterprise solution. That's right. Um, and

I, and I do think that's really important to know. And maybe there will be a time in the future where as, you know, messaging and conversational commerce evolves that people will be more familiar with that. We really only have one, uh, key call to action that we use for keywords, right? Which is essentially reply. Why, right? Reply. Why to buy, um, we've aimed ourselves specifically at, you know, using that car technology and that payment technology and essentially rebuilding the customer's, uh, order for them because they've already given us that data, right? Which is sort of one of our, you know, the things that has gotten

under my skin. I know we've talked about it a lot, but it's like, you know, the original thesis and mission of the company was there's all this data that exists out there on my buying behavior. Right. And, um, you know, why isn't a company, it's not a, it's not a technical problem. It's simply that someone hasn't reassembled the digital Legos, you know, in, in sort of this particular frame or, or, you know, um, workflow. And that's really what we've set out to do. You know, one, one thing about that, Ryan, that I always found really interesting about how you tell the story is, you know,

talk to me a little bit about why you felt that, um, Snapchat wouldn't, you know, build a solution or an Instagram wouldn't necessarily have built, you know, this type of meaningful commerce experience for the customer. And we've mentioned before about how a channel, uh, you know, I consider Instagram or Snapchat, a specialized channel. They really are. They're walled garden channels. They're the, they're the sole provider of the capability of communicating in that space. And, you know, we've already talked about how, if you use the walled gardens solution for commerce, it only works in the walled garden and your customer is going to move from garden

to garden to garden as their interests change. Yeah. And so, you know, yesterday, last year it was, it was Snapchat. Now it's TikTok next year, it's going to be something that we don't even know. And if you can't follow your customer around that, you know, that's what, that's perhaps the biggest reason why we've seen companies like Snapchat probably won't go. And that's really consumer engagement driven. It's really the consumer making the choice and the brand saying, I'm, I'm willing to kind of meet you, you know, where you're at. And, and then what about, you know, what about the way that Snapchat makes money? How is

that tied to this? Exactly. The alternative, the, the, the other frame for this is, you know, from the inside, we've seen, you and I have both tried to do some level of commerce inside of the Snapchat ecosystem. And what we saw, you know, part, part of it was how to build relationships. Part of it was a variety of other, you know, contractual things or just user experiences. But really what it boiled down to is incentives inside the space. If I get paid every time I send an ad and right now I can make you pay for 56 ads before the person buys and you're cool

with that and you'll pay for that. And you're happy with that relationship. Yeah. Then I am taking a lot of money from you and not interested in closing that deal just yet. But you know, if you, if, if, if, so in order, in order for a company to provide a commerce solution that really solves the brand and the consumer situation, they need to be completely uninterested. Yeah. In what the dollars have to really tie together, which is why we spent a lot of time talking today about, you know, how do these different entities within the financial stack, you know, essentially get paid? How do they

all get their little slice of the pie? And what's interesting about what you just mentioned about, you know, Snapchat and Instagram is a great segue into the sort of last, um, you know, a particular channel that, that, um, we intersect out, which is messaging. Right. And so we've talked a lot about how messaging providers. So the providers that host your phone number, they help you build that list of consumers, right. Um, collect their phone numbers, maybe even tie them together with your, you know, e-commerce orders or provide some type of CRM. Most of them are one way dialogue, maybe some are two way dialogue, but

all of these solutions, they get paid when you send a message. So really they're just another advertising platform. Yeah. We like to call them the advertisers at the SMS space. Yeah. And, and Whym just isn't positioned that our business model is aligned to making money when the merchant makes money. Right. Right. And that's actually how we talk a lot about that with brands and businesses. We make money when you make money the same way that those alternative payment methods like Klarna and after paying a firm that are providing this value, um, our value added just happens to be monetization within messaging, right? Turning those conversations

into cash opportunities or closing the sales, like often what we really talk about. And the best part is we don't need to integrate with any of these messaging providers to do it. So that means that it doesn't matter what provider you're using today. And if a new provider pops in the market tomorrow, we're instantly ready and available to work on them. Right. You don't have to wait for us to integrate. You don't have to wait for us to develop partnerships. We work everywhere you can imagine on the internet. Yeah. And a lot of companies have spent, you know, kind of like death by integration, right?

Just like maintaining all of those things. And so Whym has found a way to not only, um, build in a capital efficient way, serve our customer, you know, our customers who are sellers at the same time. Um, but also do this in a way that our technology is going to scale with you as the brand or business, right. Or our customers as the brand or business, um, for a long period of time based on how we've built that technology. And, um, and then, you know, kind of as the messenger, you know, we've made some key decisions, uh, around not being the messenger, not hosting their

phone number, you know, what's going to happen, Ryan, there are actually some messengers have that have decided to maybe dabble in building a payment solution that solves maybe one really important use case for their merchant base or something like that, you know, how should brands and businesses really think about choosing a payment and a cart technology in, in that particular space as that channel evolves, um, you know, in the near and maybe longterm future. Yeah. I mean, we've, I think we've, we've touched on this a couple of times now, but you know, these providers, they're trying to solve a real problem. They recognize that the

moment of commerce does happen on their channel. And they're trying to figure out how can we help the brands capitalize on that, but also how can we capitalize on that? And the unfortunate situation they find themselves in is that they're the channel of the moment and they may not be the channel of the moment tomorrow. And they may not, they may be the channel moment for this brand, but not necessarily for that brand. So as you as a brand are thinking through what provider do I want to use, you know, Whym's messages, if you pick Whym, you don't have to care what messaging channel you're

on today and tomorrow. You just take us with you wherever you go. Right. And that really empowers not just you as the merchant to basically continue to use the same software, the same providers, the same capabilities everywhere you meet your customer, but also empowers the customer. Every time they meet you, it's the same experience, no matter if they met you through DriftBot today, and then tomorrow emailed you, and then tomorrow texted you, you know, they, no matter how they meet your brand, they're going to encounter a familiar, friendly experience that they've seen a hundred times before. And then even more interesting, if they've been doing

that with another brand that you've never even, that that's completely unrelated to you, but is related to Whym in some way, and it may be a completely different industry even, and then they come meet you and you're also using Whym. Well, their interest in buying has gone up because it's familiar and it meets their needs and it's channel focused. And it's not, you know, this genericized environment that e-commerce has become. It really focuses on what they're doing at that moment and helping them transact when they are already on the channels that they're on. Yeah. And just, you know, to kind of summarize what you're saying,

um, you know, there are platforms out there that are going to host your phone number, right? So they're going to work on SMS. A great example of this is like attentive, right? You might send your mass messaging through attentive, but the payment solution that an attentive would provide or could provide maybe at some point in the future, they are not going to be able to take that over and use it on WhatsApp or on a swipe up ad, right? And so you're, as the brand or business, you're going to have to make this choice. Also, let's say you find a different SMS provider tomorrow that

better fits your needs. You can't take all of your customers, you know, now you've got their payment information and their cart. You don't have to onboard them again. And, you know, we've, we've talked about this a little bit too, but to kind of grab a, you know, a page from the history book, um, you know, eBay in its early days, really, they built a payment solution that only worked on their, it was called bill pay. Bill, uh, bill point. That's right. Um, and so bill point, you know, bill point was their solution for a particular use case for their customers. And, um, and what happened

was, you know, PayPal was ubiquitous and PayPal was also a solution like Whym where, you know, we onboard our customer only using the mobile phone number. So we onboard the customer using that mobile phone number and we do it once and forever, right? And then it's a ubiquitous solution. You can use that across SMS. You can use it over any DM channel and the customer gets to have not only that convenience, but like you said before, that trust and confidence of associating Whym with that messaging point of sale. And I think that's going to be really important as we start to look at, you know,

Whym is the first of its kind. Um, you know, who are those other payment providers that are going to emerge in the space, create value, you know, things like that. Well, and in addition to that, you know, there are things that PayPal should have done. They never did. And we are, you know, due to the nature of how we're taking transactions, we had to focus on those things first rather than just payments, right? And what are some of those things? And so, you know, the most important thing is a customer is going to meet you and they may love you or soon will love you.

They want to engage more, but they're just not going to engage fully to the depth of purchase and become a strongly converted customer right now. And so, Wynn is saying there's a moment, there's actually a large moment between the moment they meet you and the time they want to pay where we need to do a better job helping that customer maintain their relationship to you, really develop that partnership and that knowledge and see those impressions they need to see without you being so in their face all the time with 56 impressions that they didn't ask for. Let them give themselves impressions of you by letting

them keep you in a list of, in a place where they're maintaining their relationship with you themselves. And then after they've checked out, Wynn has this unique capability to help them re-engage with you so that you keep that customer and help convert them into a more long-term, not so shallow, one-time purchase customer, but a customer that's with you forever. Yeah. And that feature in beta is called Smart Repurchase, right? Where it's essentially really harnessing what I believe the power of programmatic messaging is. You know, messaging is a really special space. We've got high open rates, one-to-one unique experiences where you have direct access to the

customer. And it's almost as if programmatic messaging came in and was like this perfect fit to solve a problem. A lot of times when we talk about this story, Ryan, we talk about, oh, you know, ad technology really focuses on the what. Yeah. But Wynn's value proposition is to combine the what and the when. Yeah. Through one-to-one experiences, the brand doesn't have to lift a finger to basically activate, right? So we can, you know, help to close that sale on behalf of the brand or business with that customer without the brand having to go in and segment a list and push a button to hit

send. And then it feels impersonal because it goes out to 30,000, you know, people with a particular offer. We can use that data that we're collecting and the programmatic messaging to actually create those one-to-one experiences that are, have a higher likelihood of closing the sale more than your e-commerce site. Yeah. Right. And more than that mass message that just doesn't necessarily feel like it was built for you. And in our iteration on this service, you know, the programmatic messaging that exists in the market today, you know, it's being built by companies who get paid for how many messages they send. That's right. And so the

incentive for them is to send more messages rather than close more deals. Yeah. And so Whym's, you know, we're using very similar technologies to these players. We're just building them with a different incentive structure that really says like, hey, Whym is taking on the effort of figuring out what, who, what customers should be segmented and why, and how can we contact them? And let's get them back into the repurchase sale. And we get paid when we close the deal, which means that we're coming up with innovative ways to be smarter about that so that we're not oversaturating the customer too much messaging, the customer's only

getting what they want to get, but that yet they're still engaging with you in a much deeper way than they ever did. And I love how we kind of combine our two passions of how we see the SMS, you know, space, right? And you're always kind of joking with me that I use my text message. Yeah. And, you know, I love the convenience of text message. You actually love text message because it is, you know, it's precious. And you also know that you're going to always look, you know, you're going to look to that space and you're going to open everything that comes into that

space. And so we've really balanced with the technology and our approach to market of like, let's not recreate this email, you know, spam situation. Let's actually create more value for the customer by potentially delivering them less messages, but by aiding in their memory and aiding in that frictionless experience and that convenience, right? To help close the sale, not only once on behalf of the brand, but to really build that lifetime value that we talked about at the beginning of, you know, the first, the first session. That's right. And, you know, I think that's, that is the way that Whym can create value and these types

of alternative payment methods can create value. The last thing I want to talk about is, you know, how, how should we think about payment security evolving? Yeah. There's so much going on right now with messaging. It's, it's kind of this old and new space at the same time. And there's a new program called verified sender. And you've often referred to this as the rise of the blue check mark. Right. Yeah. Can you tell us, you know, a little bit more about, you know, talk about verified sender and, and what that really means for the industry, for consumers and how brands and businesses should be thinking

about this? Yeah. So, you know, the blue check mark is something we've all become a little bit familiar with now. It really was pioneered in the social commerce spaces. That's right. And it was, it was, it was an excellent solution. You know, they, they were the first to recognize that people were impersonating the real individual. And how could you trust that these messages were coming from the people that you really want to trust? Blue check mark gave you the capability of saying, I, we know that this person is who they say they are. I remember getting messages from, uh, you know, brands or influencers at

Snapchat who, you know, knew I worked there and they were saying, Hey, like, can you tell the partnerships team to like, give me the blue check box. Like this is, this is really me, you know? And so it really does. It has, it has been used, um, as this sort of certification of trust and confidence and that you've got the right account idea. Right. It's great that that was pioneered in that space, but now the SMS world has finally realized, Oh my gosh, we can use this and it can solve some major problems for us. You know, historically, the way that the SMS space differentiated

between a individual talking to an individual versus a company talking to an individual was that you just had to put a lot of money down. You had to buy this thing called a short code. You would spend thousands of dollars on it per year just to have it. Plus, you just had to pay your messaging costs. Plus it took like four months to even get one. And so it was really hard to get this, but that's how they could tell the consumer that you were someone more than just a normal person talking on the phone. It was almost like, you know, entering a credit card

during signup, right? It helps reduce spam and, you know, just kind of, it makes sure that people are serious about using that channel. So that was the historical way of doing it. And the problem was that a bunch of brands said, okay, well, I don't want to pay that bill. So we're going to share a code. And by sharing the code, we're going to, you know, divide that cost among ourselves. But then that became a big problem because any one bad actor who shared that code could ruin the game for everyone. sharing that code because the SMS carriers couldn't tell the difference between you and

whoever else was sending on that channel. Right. And so as a consumer, if I'm getting, you know, messages from Skims and Verishop and, you know, you know, Kylie Cosmetics, all of those brands could have been on leasing one number. Yeah. And so if at some point, like, let's say I got, you know, someone was sending me just like a lot of messages. They weren't relevant. You know, I got my 20% off, you know, discount and I'm not getting any more value right out of these marketing promotions. If I say stop, one good thing is that, you know, Verizon and AT&T, they've actually set a rule,

right? They've said, if someone says stop, you can no longer at the carrier level, like your cell phone carrier is protecting your inbox. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And so, you know, they kind of said, okay, no more sending. Well, that means that unknowingly you have now unsubscribed from an untold number of brands. Yeah. Without really knowing it because those rules weren't really told to the consumer, which wasn't very fair. And then kind of like you said, created a massive compliance issue within the industry. So, you know, bring us up to speed, right? Now what's going on? So verified center changes the whole game. Carriers are finally

catching up. It's one piece of a variety of pieces of the puzzle that they're using to basically say, hey, stop sharing shortcodes. That's not allowed anymore. Every brand gets a one or gets an individualized personalized number. You can actually have more than one if you want, but all those numbers have to be verified against who's sending from them. And they're creating this signature that goes not just from the message being sent, but it goes across the entire network, all the way to your phone and all the devices and all the carriers in between, they're all working really hard right now to basically eventually bubble that

up to you as basically a blue check mark inside of your SMS thread. So you know that if you're talking to a brand, I won't name any brands, but let's say pick a brand in your mind. If that brand communicates with you, you'll know that that brand is who they say they are when they talk to you. And if you say stop, you're only saying stop to that brand. But one of the best technologies that's happening in SMS space is they're keeping that stop command. You know, email really made a mistake by not giving you a one click button, like a one size fits all

solution to unsubscribe. Yeah. So you don't even know. You just got to hope. You hope that they've unsubscribed. And then you get another one. Exactly. And you're like, I feel like I did this. Didn't I unsubscribe? I can't remember. Right. And, uh, and so you still have an inbox with thousands of emails. So it's likely not going to happen in this space. No, but you know, brands who use the wrong playbook in this space are going to kill the channel for themselves. They can't kill the channel for everybody, thankfully. Right. But they can kill the channel for themselves by misusing it and making their customers

unhappy. And so the carriers are working really hard to kind of help you plan what messages you're going to send. But at the end of the day, you can still send whatever you want to send. And if you get a lot of customers saying stop, you're going to kill your own ability to communicate with your customer. And at least it eliminates kind of the bad actors or maybe the less relevant, you know, folks that are putting that effort into marketing or evolving their thinking around the channel by creating more value with tools like Whym, right? Like Whym can create an incredible amount of value with

converting your customers, delivering value to them over time. And so there are going to be lots of different types of tools like this that you can add to your messaging strategy, right? To continue to add value to those customers in a way that's really consumer centric, right? A lot of times when we see software built, it's really built more as brand centric. Right. And and I think utility software, utility software. And I think Whym actually does a really fantastic job of walking that line because we kind of built both sides of the experience at the same time. Right. And we're one of, we're very unique

because we're the actually the only company that did that. Right. We had those direct interactions with the brands and the customers. Um, and so we kind of felt the pain, all of those, you know, those different experiences and, and we're able to gain, you know, kind of insights that way. I mean, what you're talking about is the history of how we came to the conclusions we came to, which is that we first started out by being the brand selling to these customers. That's right. So we heard every complaint. We heard every happy message. We heard all the conversation in between and all the messages that

may not have mattered to a computer, but mattered to our staff. Totally. Enough to help us gain the insights we needed to know. This is how the consumers want to handle it. And, and those insights are impossible to learn any other way. Yes. And so now that we have them, it really influences everything we do and it makes our solution very unique.